Abstract

Despite well-publicised health and social benefits of physical activity, like their younger counterparts, the majority of older people tend to lead relatively sedentary lives. This cross-sectional study investigates the impact of residential locality, specifically whether older adults live in their own home in the community (n=374) or in independent living units in retirement villages (n=323), on participation in the leisure-time physical activities (LTPA) of walking, swimming, dancing and lawn bowls. The survey illustrates that, despite being older and in poorer health, retirement village residents report greater frequency of participation in the LTPA of walking, dancing and lawn bowls than older Australians living in the community. As encouraging physical activity is a global public health priority, these findings suggest that a priority for future research is to investigate how and why the social and physical environment of retirement communities might foster LTPA among older adults.

These databases contain citations from different subsets of available publications and different time periods and thus the citation count from each is usually different. Some works are not in either database and no count is displayed. Scopus includes citations from articles published in 1996 onwards, and Web of Science® generally from 1980 onwards.

Citations counts from the Google Scholar™ indexing service can be viewed at the linked Google Scholar™ search.

Full-text downloads displays the total number of times this work’s files (e.g., a PDF) have been downloaded from QUT ePrints as well as the number of downloads in the previous 365 days. The count includes downloads for all files if a work has more than one.